


shores to homeland

by riverbanks



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Black Emporium Exchange 2016, F/M, Trespasser DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 04:48:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8149624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverbanks/pseuds/riverbanks
Summary: As long as they have the now to worry about, they don't have to think about what comes next.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sunspot (unavoidedcrisis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unavoidedcrisis/gifts).



After the Inquisitor's final hearing, the inner council is summoned, addressed and dismissed to their own devices, and the rest of them are left to wander the Blue Palace until Trevelyan is ready to say her goodbyes.

Cassandra finds him still in the designated council quarters, the makeshift room provided the Inquisition by the Conclave board for private meetings. He's still leaning over the table as he was when Cassandra left an hour ago, poring over the maps with his usual look of concern.

"Commander," she greets from the door, and as he looks up at the sound of her voice, his eyes grow softer.

"I imagine that's not my title anymore," he says, and it sounds a bit as a joke, but there's a tone of wistfulness in it that Cassandra doesn't miss.

"It is while there are still men under your command," she counters, and he sighs into a small smile in return.

She understands the feeling. Disbanding the Inquisition is not a decision taken selfishly, or lightly; Trevelyan made sure they were all -Leliana, Josephine, Cullen and Cassandra- part of the long, drawn out discussions that lead to this, and this outcome is something they've all agreed to as a team. The steps to ending their Inquisition were as difficult as the decision to start it had been, it turned out.

"I still have so much to do," Cullen says, turning back to his papers sprawled all over the map. "Most of our Fereldan soldiers I can turn over to the crown, the Queen's army would not refuse able arms. I'm not sure our Orlesian soldiers want anything to do with their own armies either way, split as they are, although that's a problem for the Orlesian crown, not mine. Then there's the matter of the Templars, they've yet to..."

He's rambling, sounding ideas off the war table rather than talking to her proper, and Cassandra shakes her head, chuckling to herself. This takes her back to their last morning in Kirkwall, before the incident in the Gallows that sent them fleeing the city into the night. Cullen was like this then too, pacing around the Knight-Commander's desk, a strange fire to his eyes as he rambled on -what to tell the Knight-Templars? Who to leave in his place? Where to send the mages? Starkhaven? No, too unstable yet. Ostwick? How much to tell the Guard Captain about the red lyrium if Hawke herself had not told her yet?- and so on.

She watched him then as she does now, but there is a difference -back then, she knew nothing of this man in front of her, fretting like a mother hen over his men. Now, near four years later, Cassandra feels like she knows him, at times, better than he knows himself.

She crosses the room and steps around the wide wooden table to stand beside him, and it's enough to stop his pacing and make him take a slightly less tense stance, one hand reaching up to rub at the nape of his neck, willing himself to calm down. Cassandra leans her hip against the table and lets her head rest against his shoulder, and he lets out a deep breath that's almost a shudder.

"You don't have to do this all by yourself, Cullen" she reassures him, though she knows it's to little effect. "And you don't have to do this right now. There's time."

"I want to," he insists, then corrects himself. "Well, no, I don't _want_ to -but if I must, then I want it done at once. Barring Trevelyan's arrangements with the Wardens and the Templars, our soldiers have been always volunteers, not conscripts, and these men have lives beyond our whims. They have families to return to, they have long journeys to make if they mean to join their countries' armies now... I have no right to hold a defunct Inquisition over them until I'm in a mood to make decisions."

"Cullen..." she starts, but the pleading look he gives her stops her words short. The reality of their situation is not half quite as dire or urgent as Cullen makes it sound, but Cassandra knows Cullen tends to make these things disproportionately personal, and this is an argument lost between them before it even starts.

He shifts then, turning towards her, one hand reaching for her waist and pulling her closer, resting at the small of her back.   


"Let me have this," he asks her, his voice gentle now. "As long as I have this, I don't have to wonder about..."

Cassandra nods into his shoulder, understanding. She doesn't want to go there either, not here, not right now. As long as they have the now to worry about, they don't have to think about what comes next. Not for them, but for each of them. What comes next for Cullen and Cassandra is something they'll have to think about, together, but much, much later - first they'll have to figure out what comes next for Cullen, and what comes next for Cassandra, and that's something they'll each have to figure out on their own.

Cassandra has no idea what her next step must be, and she doesn't blame Cullen for being at a loss as well. Neither of them, Trevelyan or her advisors or Cassandra, entertained much of a future beyond the Inquisition, and though the decision was made as a whole between the five of them, it still leaves them all at a halt now. Once their divine purpose is fulfilled, what is left for them to do?

"We're old swords, aren't we, Commander," she jests, teasing a light punch to his arm around her waist. "What should old swords do, when there's no more war to fight?"

Cullen scoffs, a low chuckle in her ears. "What, indeed."

Cassandra stands then, raising herself from the table and leaning further into Cullen's frame until they're on level, her eyes towering a whole half an inch over his, and she claims his lips into a kiss that's neither too heated, nor too mellow for them -it's just what it needs to be. Cullen sighs into it, the tense knots of his shoulders coming loose under Cassandra's hands as she runs her hands up his arms, over his shoulder blades, up his neck, and finally burying themselves into his hair, working it loose and feeling small curls break out under her fingers.

He wraps his arms around her, hands running down her sides, and he groans low in the back of his throat as his fingers push into solid muscle, even as he takes a few steps forward, pushing Cassandra back against the rim of the table. Cassandra snorts, indignant, into the kiss then -he _dares_.

With a foot around his ankle and an easy shift of her weight into his side, Cassandra tips Cullen over, turning them around and landing him flat on his back on top of the table with a loud enough slam to rattle the door, a few steps down. He yelps as he falls back, then laughs as he realizes she got the best of him, again.

Cassandra rolls her eyes at him, grinning despite herself. There will be sunlight shining into the Fade before the day comes when the Commander bests her in combat, leave alone in this.

She crawls up over the table and lies back beside him then, and it's a strange feeling of freedom, of youthful recklessness to not truly mind that they're crumpling the maps below them like sheets, that they're likely spilling ink over some important paper or another as they both turn on their sides and stare at each other like this. Like old friends playing like children in some dank, dark room of someone else's palace, ruining important records of someone else's lives, someone else's duties that's not theirs anymore -not right now, anyway.

Cullen takes her hand in his then, draws small patterns over her fingers.

"This is why I hate the sea," he mutters, and Cassandra is taken back to that night some four, that now feel like twenty, fourty years ago. The night on the ship, some any weeks away from Kirkwall, any weeks from the port of Amaranthine yet, with nothing but miles and miles of ocean around them to see in any direction, and no direction at all but the light of the stars above them. 

“This is why I hate the sea,” Cullen had said then, looking like a sickly, exhausted and skittish boy and nothing like the healthy, portly and even slightly (if charmingly) overconfident man he looks now, and Cassandra had raised him an eyebrow in question.

“There’s nothing out there,” he’d grunted, glaring at the unending ocean around them and nothing in particular. “You can’t see a thing, you can’t know where you’re going.”

Cassandra smiles at him in the now, and turns her hand around to catch his, bringing it up to study the scars and cuts in his fingers a moment.   


There is still so much to do, so many duties and responsibilities they can’t ignore at the drop of a hat, so much they have to answer for and so many choices they’ve yet to make. There are miles and miles of oceans to cross ahead of them in the months to come as they dismantle this small empire they’ve helped build, and find new paths for themselves, new places to go, new battles, big or small, to fight. There is an unknown future of choices and freedom ahead of them, that neither Cassandra nor Cullen ever imagined themselves living long enough to see, and neither knows what to do with yet, but for now -for now this, right here, is what they have. And Cassandra realizes, though she’s know long enough, that whatever they are for now, and whatever they might become in the future, this at least is safe. It's worth preserving.

Her own voice echoes in her ears, the words rising back the same as they were from the memory of four, fourty years ago, as Cassandra looks at Cullen and tells him, once again-

“We’ll see the shore soon enough.”


End file.
